Familiar with the details, spent years as a PICU doc and earned my face marks. When people come into my office with N95’s it is almost always with the flapper due to comfort and “cool factor,” I guess. If you are not properly fit for an N95 it is no better than any other option, and if you are properly fit, they are uncomfortable. I have yet to see someone who is wearing one, wear it properly. Wasting valuable PPE is a horrible idea in our current state and come fall it will get much worse. Please leave medical grade masks for healthcare providers.
No, it doesn’t. There is evidence that wearing a mask decreases your risk of contracting covid, just not by enough to make it worth doing for that alone. Like on the order of roughly 10%. However, the dramatic decrease in risk of spreading the illness def makes it worth it.
One thing I thought was really interesting about this was that there was no visible exhaust up past the nose and eyes, which I had expected to see. Given that breath obviously escapes up there, it’s interesting that visible droplets don’t appear to. Perhaps droplets big enough to be visible have enough inertia that they tend to either pass through the mask or stick to it, leaving only the very small droplets and humid air to leave around the sides and top.
That does seem to be the fundamental difference. They can’t imagine doing anything even slightly inconvenient to help strangers. And in many cases, merely being asked to help other people enrages them.
Good catch. Since our fogging glasses tell us there’s escape there it indicates a failing of the demonstration.
Reminds me of the meme where a lab tech coughed on two Petri dishes. One with a mask one without. Of course the unmasked one grew lots of bacteria. Problem is covid is a virus so the Petri dish thing is pretty useless scientifically speaking.
We’re not so much trying to catch all breathing as trying to stop the spray of speaking, coughing and sneezing from shooting into someone else’s space. Mask wearing isn’t supposed to be a replacement for social distancing, it’s an augmentation for indoor spaces and areas where maintaining a 6ft separation isn’t always possible.
The primary benefit of all masks in the public settings is reducing the velocity of outgoing air. Most masks That cover the nose and mouth fulfill that basic requirement.
When I see someone in a store not wearing a mask over their nose, I tell them “Cover all your face holes!”
There have been several studies that suggest there is a reduction of contracted viral load when you wear a mask that can result in a reduced severity of infection.
Way back in April? May? some time earlier this year, I did some research with the help of some links from forum members, medical researchers in the family, and lots of deep rabbit hole searches on JSTOR and Scholar. What I found was that two cotton layers with a silk layer in between was found to contain the most droplets of different sizes, with 3 layers of cotton coming in second.
I’ve been using the “AB nurse” pattern with variations for face size and nose and chin comfort, cutting up old tshirts for the cotton layers and with a coffee bag closure thing as a nosepiece. First thing I learned was pre-shrink the silk so hot-water washing doesn’t ruin the mask. Whatever mask you make or buy, it needs to stand up to washing.
ETA: mask making from May:
It reminds me of that “What is water” thing where the old fish passes the young fishes, and says “The water is nice today!”, and the young fish look at each other, puzzled, and one says “What is water?”
We don’t really consciously grasp that we are walking around in a fluid, too, and steeping in everyone else’s whatever.
Completely meaningless. LARGE particles from HEALTHY people are reduced when something is infront of the mouth, who would of thought (after all, that’s why they tell us to cough into our sleeve)
U of M states many reasons why “masks for all” is pointless, along with real world studies.
There is some agreement to their study, with a but: “There is evidence from laboratory studies with coughing infectious subjects that surgical masks are effective at preventing emission of large particles, and minimizing lateral dispersion of cough particles, but with simultaneous displacement of aerosol emission upward and downward from the mask.”
“In sum, wearing surgical masks in households appears to have very little impact on transmission of respiratory disease.”
In summary, though we support mask wearing by the general public, we continue to conclude that cloth masks and face coverings are likely to have limited impact on lowering COVID-19 transmission, because they have minimal ability to prevent the emission of small particles, offer limited personal protection with respect to small particle inhalation, and should not be recommended as a replacement for physical distancing or reducing time in enclosed spaces with many potentially infectious people. We are very concerned about messaging that suggests cloth masks or face coverings can replace physical distancing. We also worry that the public doesn’t understand the limitations of cloth masks and face coverings when we observe how many people wear their mask under their nose or even under their mouth, remove their masks when talking to someone nearby, or fail to practice physical distancing when wearing a mask.
They are just concerned in the same way that Fauci was concerned early on, that people would feel it was unnecessary to socially distance if they were wearing masks.
Given that Covid is thought to be largely spread by droplets source control masks are a useful tool, and even cloth masks can help. They can filter the droplets when they are large right after they have left the mouth. Without a mask, the droplets evaporate and get smaller and harder to filter. Of course, better masks are better.
Also, your source is old, ancient in COVID the time scale.
